via. H/T Catia Cecilia Confortini. With apologies to Ryan Gosling and Danielle Henderson.
Feminist Rick Santorum
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Month: February 2012
Cyber Nerd Blogging: Neuroscience, Conflict and Security
Antoine Bousquet has a fascinating post at Disorder of Things on developments in neuroscience and how they are being used by militaries to 1) enhance their own soldiers and 2) degrade the abilities...
A Farewell to Norms
Here's something funny: I've been so mired in studying how international norms emerge for the past few years that I haven't given much thought at the theoretical level to how they fall apart. To be...
In Social Science, You’re always Under-read, so How do you Choose ? (2)
Here is part one, where I noted Walt, the Duck, and Walter Russell Mead as the IR blogs I read almost always despite the avalanche of international affairs blogs now. Here are a few more: Martin...
More Month: February 2012 Posts
Global Implications of the Contraception Kerfuffle
Our readers are surely aware of the contraception kerfuffle, the outpouring of criticism and controversy engendered by the Obama's administration's efforts to ensure that more American women have access to contraception as part of their health plans. With the insurance schemes of religious-affiliated universities and hospitals often not covering contraception services for women, the Obama administration sought to use the new health care law to extend access to contraception. (It took John Stewart to point out that many of these same plans cover Viagra for men but not contraception for...
In Social Science, You’re always Under-read, so How do You Choose ? (1)
If there is one constant to modern social science, it is that you are always under-read. There is always some critical book you missed, some article you never had time for, some classic of which you only read the first and last chapters in grad school. And this is just the modern work immediately relevant to your field. After college you all but gave up on reading the ‘great books’ in the Chicago sense – Plato, Augustine, Mill, Nietzsche, etc. That’s the stuff that really got you interested in social analysis – you’ve still got a marked up copy of Aristotle’s Politics somewhere - but if you...
Friday Nerd Blogging
"hunger" "rebellion""mutations""killer kids""torture and execution""weapons""medicine""tributes""weird science"This President's Day week, tickets went on sale for The Hunger Games movie. While you re-read the books and prepare yourself to be generally underwhelmed by the film (seriously? casting kindly-wise-old-Father-of-Elizabeth-Bennett as a bloodthirsty dictator?), let me encourage you to purchase The Hunger Games Companion. The Companion is jam-packed with history, science, survival facts, literary analysis, mythology and trivia about real-life sites around which the key phenomena in the...
Learning to Fish Through Human Rights Data
I often encourage my students to distill complex analytical concepts into terse, plain English. But some things can't be boiled down to a tweet, as I discovered this week when attempting to explain Cingranelli-Richards data coding in response to Joshua Foust's queries on my abusers' peace post.What I didn't think to tell him in response to his original question was: here is how you can look it up for yourself. So this post contains (I hope) a better answer to Josh's question but also a brief primer on the CIRI dataset, what it contains and how to use it. I should add that I've never used it...
War Crimes and the Arab Spring. Again.
The direct targeting of actors protected under the laws of war has been one of the most disturbing trends arising out of the Arab Spring. For example, the targeting of medical workers and ambulance drivers was well documented and reported on last year. Additionally, here at the Duck we've been following the issue. In recent months Dan Nexon wrote about the targeting of doctors who treated protesters in Bahrain and I've bloged about the growing concern of the ICRC who have seen themselves and their workers targeted. Unfortunately, this trend has continued into 2012. In January, the...
Abusers’ Peace?
In reaction to Charli's provocative February 20 post on the constructivist peace, I left a number of questions in comments. Since more people read the blog than read the comments, I thought it was worthwhile to put them on the front page as a separate post. Thus, if you are interested, click through. I've added a few pertinent links as well to create added value for people who already read the original comments.I'm not familiar with the specific studies noted in Charli's post, but do wonder about the scope and interpretation of the data -- especially in regard to the "abusers' peace." 1....
All Male Soldiers are Rapists and all Female Soldiers are Weak Homewreckers: Fox News on Female Soldiers
I mostly try to let Fox News polemics slide past me like water off a ducks back. It was easy to dismiss Liz Trotta's first rant about the proposed changes to the US military, which will allow more women into front-line positions (and recognize those women who are already in these posts) but the second iteration, in which she clarifies her position (and clearly reads a diatribe from a prompter) demands another interruption to my blogging hiatus. We should start with a briefing of Liz-isms, including: "hardline feminist," "feminist biology," and "feminist creed." Let's see if these become...
Vietnam PS Impressions (2): GDR in the Jungle
Here is part one, where I noted how much the communist super-idolization of leaders like Ho and Mao weirds me out. Here are a few more social science impressions from our university trip:4. What is it about communist states and concrete? Ech. It is so ugly and awful-looking. And it looks even worse and more out of place in the tropics. Mozambique and Vietnam look like the GDR in the jungle. The German Democratic Republic was architecturally hideous enough with its soulless, modernist-boxy, steel-and-concrete gigantism. Now drop that model into a third world tropical setting, and the outcome...